Reviewed by James Tyner

In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote, "When in the long war years Death snatched so many a dear comrade and friend, it would have seemed to me almost a sin to complain. After all, were they not dying for German?"

For Hitler, dying for one's country represented the "apogee of love & devotion." But this presented a conundrum that preoccupied Hitler for the rest of his life: "Why in war do the best human beings die while the worst survive?"  

Hitler imagined that Jews failed the sacrificial imperative. But he was wrong: Approximately 100,000 German Jews fought in the First World War, with upwards of 12,000 dying."

Hitler undertook the Holocaust to "balance the scales of death." For Koenigsberg, the Holocaust represented an extension of the logic that allows leaders of nation states to sacrifice the lives of their own soldiers. If German soldiers were suffering and dying in massive numbers on the field of battle, "so Jews would be required to suffer and die in massive numbers in the camps."